Prague, Czech Republic, January 21th – First major patch adds support for offline single-player (Steam version of Miner Wars 2081), optimizations, bug fixes and adds two free add-ons: Cheats and 2.5D Experiment.

Dear Community,

It has been almost two months since we released Miner Wars 2081 and it’s time for updates and some recapitulation.

Today we released a new patch that adds:- Offline single-player for Steam version of Miner Wars 2081 – in other words, now you don’t have to be connected to internet and logged into our servers to play the campaign. - Optimizations and bug fixes, more info: http://www.minerwars.com/CurrentBuildFeatures.aspx- Two new add-ons available for free as part of Miner Wars 2081 installation:o Cheats – infinite ammo, immortality, skip to any mission, and more (Ctrl+F1 in game)o 2.5D Experiment - multiplayer 2.5D add-on for MW 2081 - available as a set of 2.5D death-match maps (all 2.5D sectors have 2.5D as a prefix)

We want to address an important issue many players have reported - low FPS (bad performance) even on computers that should run the game smoothly. After some investigation we have found the cause – it happens on some computers that have one integrated GPU (graphic card) and one external and more powerful GPU. Expected behavior in this case is that driver/OS switches to the more powerful GPU once Miner Wars 2081 is launched and game runs smoothly. Due to unknown reasons, this doesn’t happen on certain systems. We are working on a fail-safe solution – until then please do the following: disable integrated GPU (best in BIOS) or check our trouble shooting page: http://www.minerwars.com/Troubleshooting.aspx

Another issue that needs our response is the accusation of censorship about DRM in Miner Wars. I believe this happened after we deleted one offensive and untruthful post on our Youtube channel. We have deleted posts for reasons that were not related to DRM. If we did delete any comment on our forum, it’s only in extreme cases and I know that we deleted only a handful of comments in the whole history of Miner Wars.

I can assure everyone that we are not censoring posts, if those posts don’t substantially break discussion rules. We are definitely not censoring posts that say “This game has DRM” – proof at our Steam forum which is full of these discussions and we didn’t mind them: http://steamcommunity.com/app/223430/discussions/

There is much more to say and I will continue next week on my blog. To everyone who is interested in what we are working on right now - we are rewriting our rendering engine from XNA to DirectX and then we want to optimize it further. Meanwhile, I am working on the design document for our next unannounced project!

Last but not least, I am happy to announce that last week we crossed boundary of 50,000 sales. This number is far more than what we expected. Thank you!

I just got the email annoucement and stumbled over the STEAM announcment when I logged into my STEAM accounton my XP computer. You all just made me quite happy! Now all I have to do is get the payment ready.

The only thing I am waiting on now is the offline mode to be made availiable for the NON-STEAM release too.I would like to install the NON-STEAM release on my Windows 7 computer so I can compare play and performanceon both. And so that IF I decide to take a shot at online/MP play I can do it on my Win 7 so I only have to log into my account here instead of having to log into two accounts to play the game.

No Problem with people getting for free what some of us paid for as we all don't pay the same price for things everywhere we go. :) I consider it as them having a giant sale now that I missed (lol)! :)

QUOTE: I just received Miner Wars 2081 through the indiegamestand.com bundle. The game says it's in Demo mode and will not save unless I log in. How do I use Offline Mode?

Originally when the game wasn't on Steam they said that it wasn't always online because of DRM, but because their server did some of the processing and it would be impossible to have an offline mode.

Then it came out on Steam and eventually they added an offline mode for it on there... (offline in the sense that there's not a CONSTANT connection required).

Despite this apparent advance (the offline mode was impossible before) for some reason they've not added it to the standalone version... it's almost as if they were lying when they said it wasn't DRM! But no, surely that can't be? :P

Conclusion, I doubt there'll be an offline mode in the standalone version any time soon because anyone who considers such a heavy handed solution as ALWAYS ONLINE to be acceptable is obviously incredibly paranoid about piracy.

Those threads just show me that the developers are notorious for making bad design choices and ignoring their users. I'm glad I didn't have to pay much for this game since it looks like it will evaporate sooner than I thought.

Actually, they have "Request Game Key" and "Request Steam Key" as separate buttons. So I did get a serial that works here and was able to login to the the game with my account. I just don't like that I have to do that for a single player game.

Indeed, there was both a Steam keys and a "game key" (which worked to add the game to my account here). So, back to the actual issue here, why doesn't the standalone version get an offline mode?

EDIT: A quick search tells me that the DRM on the Steam version has already been broken so a pirate version is already out there. You might as well lessen the DRM a bit now, no sense in making things harder for legitimate users when the pirates are just laughing at both us and you.

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